Billionaire Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy went against the tide and commended Elon Musk‘s success story after he became the world’s first trillionaire owing to SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO that boosted his company’s valuation past $2 trillion last week. The former presidential candidate challenged the ongoing larger debate against the ultra-wealthy, suggesting that the world’s richest person’s growth arc to becoming a new trillionaire encapsulated the essence of the ‘American Dream.’
Doing so, the Indian-origin politician and Silicon Valley personality contrasted Democratic criticism, and opposed the likes of US Senator Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who were vehemently against the economy producing a trillionaire when numerous others don’t even have access to basic healthcare.
Vivek Ramaswamy champions Elon Musk’s new-found trillionaire status
Offering his viewpoint on Elon Musk’s rise as the first trillionaire and the surging criticism against him, the Ohio gubernatorial hopeful stressed that he envisioned celebrating success as the “American way.”
“Do we believe that success is something that we celebrate, which I believe is the ‘American way’? Or do we believe that success is something we ought to villainise?” Vivek Ramaswamy posed some big questions when asked about his thoughts on the post-SpaceX IPO reality during the ‘Jesse Waters Primetime’ show on Fox News.
Sending a message to all the young people “falling in love with socialism,” Ramaswamy said, “Someone else’s success does not take away from your ability to achieve goals. Actually, when someone else succeeds, you’re more likely to succeed as well.”
In a way, Ramaswamy’s remarks align with how some estimates indicated that the SpaceX IPO on June 12 wasn’t just favourable to Elon Musk’s net worth but also to over four thousand other SpaceX employees, including engineers and even cafeteria workers, who became overnight millionaires, given the employee stock options they held as part of their company compensation plans.
Ramaswamy continued, “Just think about the story of America: We’re in the 250th anniversary of the birth of our country. What made America great? It was, in part, our system of free enterprise and… we, as a country, are a magnet for the best and brightest around the world.”
Likening the same with Elon Musk’s story, he noted,” A kid born in South Africa eventually finding his way to the United States to pursue the ‘American Dream, ‘ now the most successful entrepreneur in history.”
“That isn’t just a story about Elon Musk. It is a story about America. Think about that ‘American Dream.’ We call it the ‘American Dream’ for a reason because there is no ‘Canadian Dream.’ There is no ‘British Dream’. There is no ‘Chinese Dream.’ It is that ‘American Dream’ that makes American exceptionalism possible… I think that’s what makes our country the greatest country known to the history of mankind,” Ramaswamy went on.
“The question for us moving forward is: Are we willing to defend it? Are we willing to double down on it rather than wearing the mantle of victimhood? Are we willing to reject the siren song of zero-sum economics, which is a fallacy, as opposed to embracing success, which is what this country was all about… I think we ought to double down on what made America great.”
Ramaswamy went as far as defending capitalism, branding it the “best system known to the history of man to lift people up from poverty,” countering the statements made by Democrats.
“America is the embodiment of human potential, the embodiment of meritocracy,” the Indian-origin politician asserted. “The idea of who you are, where your parents came from, or what your skin colour is, or even what country you were born in.”
“If you come here the right way, you can achieve the maximum of your own God-given potential without any man or system or bureaucracy standing in your way,” Ramaswamy added, calling it the “heart of American greatness.”
Unlike Musk, Vivek, who originally helped the SpaceX boss found the Trump admin’s cost-cutting initiative DOGE, was born in the US. He has often emerged as an advocate of preserving the ‘American Dream,’ with the issue being even closer to his heart due to his own immigrant Indian parents coming to the US for better opportunities. If elected, the biotech entrepreneur, who is now a billionaire, will become the first Indian-origin governor in Ohio.
How Elon Musk fits into the ‘American Dream’
In simple terms, it is the belief that the United States is a land of opportunity, where anyone, regardless of their background, can achieve upward mobility and success for a better life built on the foundation of hard work and merit. The basis of the American Dream have also been underlined in the Declaration of Independence, which states, “all men are created equal” and have an “unalienable” right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The phrase, synonymously associated with the country’s identity, was coined by American businessman and historian James Truslow Adams in the 1931 book “The Epic of America.”
Therein, he defines it as “not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
Elon Musk, for his part, is now one of the most popular people the world instantly recognises in correlation with America. However, the present-day SpaceX and Tesla CEO wasn’t born there. Simply put, the world’s richest man sowed the seeds of his success story in American soil, thanks to immigration benefits like the ‘Exchange Visitor’ (J-1) and the H-1B visas, despite being emerging from South Africa.
Although US President Donald Trump has long centred his policies around an anti-immigration rhetoric, Musk, whom he once called his ‘First Buddy,’ has repeatedly positioned himself as a strong advocate for the H-1B visa. Often viewed as a “golden ticket” into the US, the same ‘specialty occupations’ non-immigrant work visa helped Musk find his professional footing in the country.
“The reason I’m in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he wrote on X in December 2024. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Born in South Africa, the present-day tech mogul came to the US as a student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. In yet another old X post, Musk himself affirmed that years before becoming a US citizen, he was “on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B.”